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The bodily Kind, in that it partakes of Matter is an evil
thing. What form is in bodies is an untrue-form: they are without
life: by their own natural disorderly movement they make away
with each other; they are hindrances to the soul in its proper
Act; in their ceaseless flux they are always slipping away from
Being.
Soul, on the contrary, since not every Soul is evil, is not an
evil Kind.
What, then, is the evil Soul?
It is, we read, the Soul that has entered into the service of
that in which soul-evil is implanted by nature, in whose service
the unreasoning phase of the Soul accepts evil- unmeasure, excess
and shortcoming, which bring forth licentiousness, cowardice and
all other flaws of the Soul, all the states, foreign to the true
nature, which set up false judgements, so that the Soul comes to
name things good or evil not by their true value but by the mere
test of like and dislike.
But what is the root of this evil state? how can it be brought
under the causing principle indicated?
Firstly, such a Soul is not apart from Matter, is not purely
itself. That is to say, it is touched with Unmeasure, it is shut
out from the Forming-Idea that orders and brings to measure, and
this because it is merged into a body made of Matter.
Then if the Reasoning-Faculty too has taken hurt, the Soul's
seeing is baulked by the passions and by the darkening that
Matter brings to it, by its decline into Matter, by its very
attention no longer to Essence but to Process- whose principle or
source is, again, Matter, the Kind so evil as to saturate with
its own pravity even that which is not in it but merely looks
towards it.
For, wholly without part in Good, the negation of Good, unmingled
Lack, this Matter-Kind makes over to its own likeness whatsoever
comes in touch with it.
The Soul wrought to perfection, addressed towards the
Intellectual-Principle, is steadfastly pure: it has turned away
from Matter; all that is undetermined, that is outside of
measure, that is evil, it neither sees nor draws near; it endures
in its purity, only, and wholly, determined by the
Intellectual-Principle.
The Soul that breaks away from this source of its reality to the
non-perfect and non-primal is, as it were, a secondary, an image,
to the loyal Soul. By its falling-away- and to the extent of the
fall- it is stripped of Determination, becomes wholly
indeterminate, sees darkness. Looking to what repels vision, as
we look when we are said to see darkness, it has taken Matter
into itself.
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